1918 The Last Act

by Barrie Pitt

  All the Somme bridges in the immediate vicinity of the town had been destroyed, but in the village of Feuilleres, some four miles west of Péronne, was found a railway bridge which could be repaired sufficiently to allow the passage of troops. As this village was already behind the British III Corps front, two brigades of Australians passed over on to the north bank of the river, and immediately pushed eastwards to form bridgeheads from which the main assaults could be launched. By midnight of the 30th, the bridgeheads had been formed, one due west of Mont St. Quentin, and one south-west from it and north-west from Péronne itself.

  Supported by five brigades of field artillery and one brigade of heavy artillery firing from the Australian positions south of the river or from behind the British III Corps lines, the attack started at 5 a.m. on the morning of the 31st. By 7 a.m., solely as a result of the surprise occasioned by the direction of the attack, Mont St. Quentin village fell to the Australians of the 17th Battalion, but unfortunately flanking attacks on each side had broken down, having lost direction in the maze of trenches which seamed the entire locality. Thus at 7.30 a.m. when the Germans counterattacked with every man they could bring to the area, they killed the majority of the Australians in the village, and drove the survivors back down the hill into a trench system running along the strip of land between the base of the hill and the river.

  And for the rest of that first day, a vicious battle was fought from trench to trench – an affair mostly of bombing attacks along the trench lines, or of gallant, heart-breaking attempts to charge along lanes through the enormous, man-high wire belts, against machine-gun fire aimed directly down them. With Mont St. Quentin still in enemy hands, no attempt could be made to capture Péronne from the bridgehead between the two objectives, so the troops there were gradually drawn upon to replace casualties lost in the battle to their left.

  But there was no attempt at secrecy or at surprise, and there were no tanks to aid the infantry – so at nightfall the Germans still held the hill-top, and the Australian dead were strewn around the foot. The exhausted survivors of the attacking battalions, grim, bitter, their courage sustained mostly by their reputation, held a line which meandered between the bridgeheads, made up of trenches unpromisingly named Florina Trench, Gott Mit Uns Trench, Deus Trench, Elsa Trench and Oder Trench.

  It cannot be said to have been a satisfactory day’s battle, especially in comparison with those which had immediately preceded it – which possibly accounts for the defiant air about the paragraph in the Fourth Army history which sums it up: ‘The attack on Mont St. Quentin by the 5th Brigade, with only hastily arranged artillery support and without a creeping barrage, ranks as one of the most notable examples of pluck and enterprise during the war.’

  Unfortunately, pluck and enterprise are not enough in battle.

  During the night, more troops were fed into the bridgeheads, and as dawn broke violent attacks were launched up the slopes of Mont St. Quentin – and owing to the ferocity with which the battle was fought, the enemy’s attention became gradually concentrated there. Australians of the 54th Battalion thus found their way into Péronne practically unimpeded, and by 8.40 a.m. they were established in the centre of the town, having cleared all points of resistance in the southern and western quarters. As they pressed on, attempting to clear the garrison out of the north-eastern districts, they in turn distracted the enemy’s attention from the fighting on Mont St. Quentin – with the result that the German commander was caught off balance and, uncertain as to which of the two positions was the more important, he suffered a moment’s indecision which gave rise to a fatal mistake. In order to recover a position he had lost, he weakened one he was holding – and when the Australians of the 6th Brigade next attacked up the face of the hill, they took the uppermost system of trenches, and from there quickly overran Mont St. Quentin village itself.

  For the remainder of that day (September 1st) the German troops counterattacked both positions fiercely, but were unable to beat the Australians out of the positions they had already won – although they kept them, in turn, out of the north-east corner of Péronne. Casualties were high on both sides, for both, despite the lessons of the last months, were relying upon direct assault to win for them the desired positions.

  But next morning, well to the south of Péronne, the Australian 15th Brigade crossed the Somme and advanced due west, thus outflanking the remnants of the German 2nd Guards Division still striving valiantly to redeem its prestige by beating the Australians back out of the positions between Péronne and Mont St. Quentin, and those infantry units still clinging to the Péronne ramparts. All these were thus forced to withdraw: and the names of Péronne and of Mont St. Quentin passed into the history of the Australian Army.

  The Dominion troops certainly fought with all the dash and resolution which had come to be expected of them; and their casualty list reflected this, for on one of the minor attacks of the first day, of twelve hundred men who advanced, only six hundred were still alive an hour later – and many of these were to fall before the end of the day. Such slaughter had not been unusual.

  But one cannot avoid wondering whether it was all necessary. During the actual progress of the Mont St. Quentin Battle, Byng’s Third Army advanced well beyond Bapaume, thus outflanking the entire position in the north as the Australians of the 15th Brigade were to do in the south. Possibly these two advances would not have been so easy had it not been for the fierce battle between them, but even this can be doubted, for the country on either side of Péronne was far more vulnerable to attack than the walled town, or the heights which dominated it.

  It is said that during the first day of the landings on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915, the Admiral in command of the Royal Naval units taking the troops ashore, watched the bitter struggle on the beaches for some time and then remarked reflectively to his Chief-of-Staff: ‘Gallant fellows, these soldiers; they always go for the thickest place in the fence.’

  Apparently even a combination of brains of the calibre of those of Rawlinson and Sir John Monash is not enough to resist the dreadful fascination of directing men engaged upon an almost impossible task.

  The Ideal

  Reality: Passchendaele, November 1917

  Reality: near Essigny, February 1918

  Reality: Le Barque, spring 1917

  Haig, Joffre and Lloyd George

  Field-Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm II and General Erich Ludendorff

  Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig

  General Sir Hubert Gough

  General Sir Henry Wilson

  General Foch and General John J. Pershing

  The Americans

  Night scene in the German trenches

  Minenwerfer crew in action

  Bombing forward

  Breakthrough

  The second wave waiting to go in

  Picquet waiting at a road block. The Lys, April 1918

  Moving up

  German tanks in action, June 1918

  The tide turning: German Storm Troops under attack during the fighting in the Marne Bulge

  General Pétain

  General Foch

  British attack through wooded country near Tardenois: July 22nd, 1918

  Mark V tanks of the 4th Battalion, Tank Corps, at Meaulte, August 22nd, 1918

  British armoured cars at Biefvillers, August 25th, 1918

  Wire belts in the Siegfried Line, stormed by the Australians

  German machine-gunners

  British Mark IV Female tank attacked by flamethrowers

  From the German angle

  Near Dury, after the battle of the Drocourt-Quéant Switch, September 2nd, 1918

  The cost of the assault

  Scene on the battlefield

  * Life of Lord Rawlinson of Trent. Ed. Sir Frederick Maurice.

  10. The Grand Assault

  AN even more cogent reason for questioning the necessity for the Australian attack upon Péronne and Mont St. Quentin is provided by the activ
ities of the Canadian Corps opposite Arras during almost the same period. Their pause on the northern hinge of the Hindenburg Line had not been of long duration, and as a result of their progress since, it seemed likely that the envisaged frontal attack on the main defensive position might receive, if not modification, at least support from a less obvious angle of attack than a right angle.

  That portion of the Line known to the Germans as the Siegfried Position ran north from St. Quentin to a point not far past a line drawn between Bapaume and Cambrai – facing the whole of the front of Rawlinson’s Fourth Army and that of the southern half of Byng’s Third Army. From this point northwards, three strong defence lines diverged, the most westerly one hingeing on the main German front line opposite Arras, the middle and perhaps most formidable one running north from Quéant up to the anchor-point of the Lille defences (the ‘Wotan Position’), while the most easterly line followed the east bank of the Canal du Nord as far as Douai on the Scarpe, thereafter continuing on up to Lille.

  These three lines lacked the deep concrete fortifications and subterranean tunnels of the main Siegfried Position, but they were nevertheless well-constructed trench systems, all protected by wire, belts at least twenty yards wide, and according to Churchill (who inspected it the morning after it fell) that of the Drocourt–Quéant Switch by a belt a hundred yards wide. Machine-gun posts covered the most likely lanes of approach to the belts, and dug-outs in the trench system, although not so bomb-proof as those to the south, nevertheless gave considerably more protection to their occupants than the majority of those built by the Allies.

  It is possible that this strength of fortification led to the loss of the lines, for if the finest elements of Ludendorff’s infantry had led the main attacks of the last few months, its most competent residue was still fighting in the remains of the salients formed by those attacks. This left only the barest minimum, in both quantity and quality, to hold what was, after all, almost the only section of the German front facing the British not to have moved forward during the recent battles. First-class fighting material would long since have been drained from it and thrown into the attack.

  But the defence of even the strongest positions relies upon the men behind the guns, and during the days immediately following the arrival of the Canadians on the northern hinge of the Line, opposite Arras, it became increasingly evident that morale was not very high amongst the Germans holding it. Artillery bombardments from the guns still in position ‘to guard the coalfields behind Béthune’ caused a certain amount of damage to the wire belts, but even more to the fighting spirit of the defenders, for during August 28th the Canadians broke through the belts and into the line, and by the 29th they had killed or captured the majority of the occupants and driven the survivors either south into the main Siegfried Position or straight back into the Drocourt–Quéant Switch.

  During August 30th, the massed artillery was thus able to devote its attention to the wire belts guarding this second position, and the following day – the day of the first attack on Mont St. Quentin – the infantry started moving up for the assault.

  It began at dawn on September 2nd. Led by fifty-nine tanks (almost the total remaining strength of the Tank Corps) two Canadian divisions advanced on a five-mile wide front, running northwards from a position some two miles north of Quéant and the junction of the lines. The attack was successful everywhere except on an unimportant section of the left flank, the tanks trundling massively through the wire, the infantry following close and then taking the trench line in a storming rush. Once the Canadians had broken into the line, the British 57th Division followed through the wire, turned south and bombed their way down the defensive positions towards Quéant itself, while the Canadians pressed directly on east of the line, and the 63rd Royal Naval Division came through, fanned south-eastwards between the Canadians and the 57th, and raced down to cut the Quéant–Cambrai railway line, filling the fork between the Switch Line and the Canal du Nord.

  Truly the day of trench warfare was over – and the fact that this complicated series of manœuvres was carried out with complete success can be attributed almost as much to growing efficiency and imagination among the British as to failing strength among the enemy. In seven hours a defence system long considered near-impregnable by both its builders and their enemies had been completely ruptured, with the result that Allied soldiers were in country which had been behind German lines since 1914.

  Even more important, the famed Siegfried Position was within measurable distance of being completely turned from the north, while as a secondary and almost unforeseen profit, the whole of the salient of the Lys basin, won by the Germans at such enormous expense in April, had become untenable.

  That evening, Ludendorff accepted the fact that the time had come for him to cut his losses. Orders were issued to the troops in the south – already retreating from in front of Rawlinson’s and Byng’s armies as a result of the losses of Péronne and Bapaume – to withdraw right back to the old British defences from which Byng’s and Gough’s armies had faced the onslaught of March 21st; there the German troops were to begin immediately to prepare the strongest possible fortified screen as a crush barrier in front of the main Siegfried Position. And in the north, from the ravaged countryside south of Ypres, from Mont Kemmel and Bailleul, Estaires and Merville, the bitter and despondent German infantry were systematically drawn back to a line east of the Lys.

  By September 9th, Armentières and Neuve Chapelle had been lost, and from the Sensée river down to la Fère the forward German screening positions were not far in advance of those from which their Storm Troops had advanced, so victoriously, only five and a half months before.

  Almost the entire territorial gains of the Ludendorff Spring Offensive had now been lost, the majority in fighting which had taken place in the thirty-two days since August 8th. Since then, too, a hundred thousand German soldiers had gone into Allied prison-camps – seventy thousand captured by the British and the remainder by the Franco–American Armies; and to Ludendorff the most ominous note about the German casualty lists was that the combined figures for dead and wounded did not make a total large enough to exceed that of those missing – of whom he had good reason to believe a substantial proportion had surrendered to the enemy.

  There had also been reported to him many more instances of local collapse and insubordination, of the type which had plunged him into gloom after the events of August 8th. ‘Stop prolonging the war!’ was a cry often heard from the wayside by marching German troops, and a troop train had been seen in Nuremberg bearing the inscription ‘Slaughter cattle for Wilhelm and Sons’ chalked upon a carriage side.

  If such episodes truly reflected the morale of his army, it was no wonder that the nine under-strength divisions holding the Drocourt–Quéant Switch had broken before the six full-strength Canadian and British divisions who, between August 30th and September 3rd, cleared the whole of the Arras front and established themselves against the line of the Canal du Nord. Not that all the German units were so badly affected, for those which still contained a high proportion of veterans of the Western Front were yet to prove themselves capable of resolute defence and even of counterattack; but where heavy casualties had been replaced by men combed out from industry or released as a result of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk from Russian prison camps, disaffection and even mutiny were rife. Officers commanding loyal battalions often preferred, in the circumstances, to carry on with greatly reduced numerical strength rather than to accept the disruptive elements which threatened to undermine morale.

  Ludendorff was therefore faced with the prospect of continuing the war with an army in which all the fighting units were either undependable or weak – and by the end of September the average field strength of his trustworthy battalions was to be reduced to less than six hundred, a number only maintained by breaking up fifteen divisions and re-allocating the men.

  He had good cause for depression – if not dismay.

  Haig, on the other
hand, had ample cause for satisfaction – yet there is a waspish note about some of his diary entries at this time, surprising in view of the situation, and also of the stolidity with which he had appeared to accept the violent criticisms levelled at him from some quarters during the disasters of the Passchendaele period. On September 1st, he had received a note from the Chief of the Imperial General Staff which included the passage, ‘Just a word of caution in regard to incurring heavy losses in attack on Hindenburg Line, as opposed to losses when driving enemy back to that line. I do not mean that you have incurred such losses, but I know that the War Cabinet would become anxious if we received heavy punishment in attacking the Hindenburg Line without success.’

  This can hardly be deemed an unreasonable attitude for a Government to take with regard to the lives of its countrymen – especially in view of recent history – and one would have thought that in the atmosphere of victory and confidence which the events since July should surely have engendered at GHQ, Haig could have accepted this missive with good humour. Instead: ‘What a wretched lot of weaklings we have in high places at the present time’, his diary reads, and later, ‘How ignorant our present Statesmen are of the first principles of war!’